Episode #7 – Color (feat. Gregor Aisch)

Here is another great episode … honestly I think it’s one of the best we have ever recorded (-Enrico). We talk about color, and color you know … it’s huge. To get some help we invited Gregor Aisch from Driven By Data and asked him to talk about his experience with color and his super useful library chroma.js.

We have to apologize for a number of things. The episode came out late, the quality is not super high and we have no transcribed chapters this time. No worries, this won’t happen again (or too often) and we have no intention to neglect DS. Moritz has been traveling and taking days off in beautiful Greece and Enrico was just having another baby.

Update: Here is the chapter list! We just could not let such a great episode go without proper chapter marks…

[00:00] Intro: Today with Gregor Aisch from http://driven-by-data.net[02:04] Computational Visualistics[03:32] Today’s topic: Color[03:46] Family drama interlude[04:08] Colors: Powerful, but tricky to get right[04:50] Color perception[09:55] Color spaces[15:39] Colors for categorical data[17:20] What’s the maximum number of categorical colors to be used?[19:40] Equidistance[20:15] Colorbrewer[23:13] chrome.js[25:56] Colors for continuous data[26:41] Mo’s six word advice[27:04] Color for continuous data – usually not advisable[30:14] Rainbow scales[30:48] …and how to avoid them[33:17] Color is difficult[35:07] More tips on how to do it right[37:29] Is there a method behind ugly visualization in science?[38:58] Paper: Evaluation of artery visualizations[42:39] How to deal with skewed distributions[46:19] Learn about the data, highlight the interesting insights[48:12] Redundant encoding and interaction between visual variables[51:13] Use for secondary dimensions, or small number of categories[52:57] Mo’s tips[54:04] Don’t forget the legend[54:34] Gregor’s tips[56:07] Above all, do no harm.[56:43] Enrico’s tips[58:27] Wrapping it up

And stay tuned for another episode soon! We will have Jeff Heer on board! If you have any questions for him add a comment below or send us an email (see address in the right).

Manuel Lima, founder of data visualization portal Visual Complexity, author of the indispensableinformation visualization bible of the same name, and one of the most intelligent people I know, recently gave an excellent talk on the power of networks at the RSA. Using examples that span from the Dewey Decimal System to Wikipedia, Manuel explores the evolving organization of knowledge and information, and the shift from hierarchical structures to distributed lateral networks.

Networks are really becoming a cultural meme in their own right. We could even argue, is this the birth of a new movement, is this the birth of ‘networkism’?” ~ Manuel Lima

Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.

So what can we expect? Which innovative ideas are already being used? And what are the most creative approaches to present data in ways we’ve never thought before?

Let’s take a look at the most interesting modern approaches to data visualization as well as related articles, resources and tools.

1. Mindmaps

Informationarchitects.jp presents the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective in a mindmap. Apparently, web-sites are connected as they’ve never been before. Quite comprehnsive.

2. Displaying News

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. The size of data blocks is defined by their popularity at the moment.

Voyage is an RSS-feader which displays the latest news in the “gravity area”. News can be zoomed in and out. The navigation is possible with a timeline.

Digg BigSpy arranges popular stories at the top when people digg them. Bigger stories have more diggs.

Digg Stack: Digg stories arrange themselves as stack as users digg them. The more diggs a story gets, the larger is the stack.

3. Displaying Data

Amaztype, a typographic book search, collects the information from Amazon and presents it in the form of keyword you’ve provided. To get more information about a given book, simply click on it.

Similar idea is being used by Flickrtime. The tool uses Flickr API to present the uploaded images in real-time. The images form the clock which shows the current time.

Time Magazine uses visual hills (spikes) to emphasize the density of American population in its map.

CrazyEgg lets you explore the behavior of your visitors with a heat map. More popular sections, which are clicked more often, are highlighted as “warm” – in red color.

Hans Rosling TED Talk is a legendary talk of the Swedish professor Hans Rosling, in which he explains a new way of presenting statistical data. His Trendalyzer software (recently acquired by Google) turns complex global trends into lively animations, making decades of data pop. Asian countries, as colorful bubbles, float across the grid — toward better national health and wealth. Animated bell curves representing national income distribution squish and flatten. In Rosling’s hands, global trends — life expectancy, child mortality, poverty rates – become clear, intuitive and even playful.

Three Views shows three views of the earth, in which each country is represented by a circle that shows the amount of money spent on the military (size of circle) and what fraction of the country’s earnings that uses (colour). Compact and beautiful presentation of data.

We Feel Fine shows human feelings, calculated from a large number of weblogs.

Websites as graphs. An HTML DOM Visualizer Applet, which displays sites as graphs depending on the amount of links, tables, div tags, images, forms and other tags.

Interactive History Timeline presents the history of Great Britain, divided into interactive data blocks. The density of events is displayed on the map.

Winning Lotto Numbers is supposed to present the frequency of appearance of every number from one year to the next one. This graph is definitely not one of the most clear ones.

Elastic Lists demonstrates the “elastic list” principle for browsing multi-facetted data structures. You can click any number of list entries to query the database for a combination of the selected attributes. The approach visualizes relative proportions (weights) ofmetadata by size and visuzalizes characteristicness of a metadata weight by brightness. Author’s blog regularly informs about new experiments in the area of data visualization. Nice to observe, useful to bookmark.

4. Displaying connections

Munterbund showcases the results of research graphical visualization of text similarities in essays in a book. “The challenge is to find forms of graphical and/or typographical representation of the essays that are both appealing and informative. We have attempted create a system which automatically generates graphics according to predefined rules.”

Universe DayLife displays events, connections and news as circles which gravitate around the topic they are related to.

Musiclens gives music recommendations and presents your current mood and musical taste as a diagram.

Figd’t Visualizer allows you to play around with your network. You interface with the Visualizer through Flickr and LastFM tags, using any tag to create a Magnet. Once a Tag Magnet is created, members of the network will gravitate towards it if they have photos or music with that same Tag. Available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Alpha-version.

Shape Of Song: What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see – literally – the shape of any composition available on the Web.

Musicmap: connections are represented as connected lines; they create a web.

Musicovery displays music taste connections and lets you listen to the song and browse through similar songs.

Lanuage Poster proves that even simple lines can be descriptive enough. The History of Programming Languages as an original timeline.

5. Displaying web-sites

Spacetime offers Google, Yahoo, Flickr, eBay and images in 3D. The tool displays all of your search results in an easy to view elegant 3D arrangement. Company promises that the days of mining through pages and pages of tiny thumbnails in an effort to find the item you are looking for are over.

UBrowser is an open source test mule that renders interactive web pages onto geometry using OpenGL® and an embedded instance of Gecko, the Mozilla rendering engine.

6. Articles & Resources

Visualcomplexity.comThe project presents the most beautiful methods of data visualization as well as further references and book suggestions. The gallery has over 450 entries.

In his article Infosthetics: the beauty of data visualization Andrew Vande Moere, well-known through his blog Infosthetics, discusses the aesthetics of data visualization and modern apparoaches in this area. Creative design ideas combine form and content and generate fascinating graphs – is it a new area in the art of next generation?The article presents 13 new techniques of data visualization, with examples and further references.

16 Awesome Data Visualization Tools“From navigating the Web in entirely new ways to seeing where in the world twitters are coming from, data visualization tools are changing the way we view content. We found the following 16 apps both visually stunning and delightfully useful.” An extensive overview by Mashable.com.

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Vitaly is writer, speaker, author and editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine, an online magazine dedicated to designers and developers.